I’ve been doing work for my in-laws church in the tri-cities for about a year and a half now. Initially I was just doing their weekly program, media stuff, website upkeep and some print materials here and there. But as time progressed I knew I wanted to do a bit of rebranding for them so their overall look could be more cohesive. It’s a project we are still in process with but I thought I would share a little bit of the recent work on it. Doing work for churches has always been something I’ve loved, mostly because there’s a lot of artistic freedom in it. Especially when the people you are working for trust you and are awesome.

When I started brainstorming for the new logo/look I knew it all had to be pretty versatile. Each month I design a new cover for their weekly program, slides for announcements and sermons. Basically, visual content is always changing depending on the time of year or type of event and can cover a pretty broad range of content. Summer barbecues, christmas concerts, food drives, yard sales, etc. I knew I needed something simple and iconic that could be paired with a few versatile fonts.

Another factor was the church has a really long full name, The Living Room Community Church. Knowing they sometimes shorten it to the monogram of the first half, “TLR” I decided a monogram stamp could work perfect and fit all types of situations. The final outcome is this fun, hand-lettered monogram. I really enjoyed playing with some different texture elements in the shading and some knockout ideas to get the stamp look going.

Next up I had to choose some fonts.

Sometimes the materials, especially the weekly program can be a bit text heavy, so I chose one of my favorite condensed fonts Alternate Gothic to use for subheads. A Swiss font for body copy that has some great condensed options as well and I really really love Lost Type so I chose the font Governor from their library for headlines. It’s so simple and bold but has it’s own little bit of character.

This is the lockup for the full logo.

What flowed really naturally from this was an icon system. Church-type materials and websites can have a lot of information going at once so I thought a nice way to work the branding of the logo in to things and to also help with visual organization was to develop some icons. These have been really fun to work on and are still in process but here’s a few so far…

And here’s a little bit of how things are playing out in some of the layout design…

It’s such a joy to have amazing clients that give me the freedom to brand them in a fashion that might be a little unconventional for the type of work they do. I believe the pay off will be awesome and lead to a very recognizable, strategic image in their community.